The National Poverty Eradica-tion Programme (NAPEP) spends N1.3 billion annually to fight poverty, the National Coordinator, Dr Magnus Kpakol, said in Port Harcourt. 

Kpakol said on Wednesday at a forum organised by the Nigeria Union of Journalists that since its inception in 2001, NAPEP’s capital budget had averaged about N1.3 billion annually for poverty eradication activities nationwide. 

He said NAPEP’s activities were funded through the Federal Government’s annual budgetary provisions. 

The coordinator noted that the modest resources available to the agency for its poverty eradication intervention programmes underscored the fact that its activities were designed to be demonstrative. 

He encouraged states and local governments to adopt NAPEP programmes and scale up their implementation for the people. 

NAPEP, he explained, was established with the primary mandate of coordinating and monitoring all poverty eradication activities in the country. 

Kpakol said the mandate recognised that Nigeria operated a federal system made up of the three tiers of government. 

According to him, the country’s poverty profile is the aggregation of the situation in all the states and local governments.The effective coordination of all tiers of government, he said, was therefore important for the country to meet its poverty eradication targets.